The African Union's top diplomat took aim at the continent's long-time rulers on Monday by saying that the time had passed when leaders could expect to cling on to power for decades. "Everybody knows that the era of 'presidents for life' is over, and everyone nowadays acknowledges that you have got to pass on the baton even, if this has been difficult for certain people," Alpha Oumar Konare told reporters on the sidelines of a conference on democracy in Africa. "I think that today, all of our leaders know that it serves no one if they stay in power for 30 years and end up like [Sese Seko] Mobutu," he added in reference to the former leader of Zaire, who was unceremoniously booted out of office in 1997 after 22 years in power and died in exile soon afterwards. "Mobutu was there for a long time. He had a lot of power, he had a lot of money, but you all saw how it ended."Konare stopped short of naming names but a number of African leaders have been in power for the last three decades. The longest-serving leader on the continent is Gabon's President Omar Bongo Ondimba, who has been in power since 1967, while Moammar Gadaffi has been in charge of Libya since 1969. Other long-time rulers in sub-Saharan Africa include Angola's Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who took power in 1979, and the 83-year-old Robert Mugabe, who has been Zimbabwean president since independence in 1980. Both men have recently taken steps to delay elections and extend their rules to the 30-year mark.
Questioned specifically about Mugabe, Konare said the Zimbabwe leader had raised "a very fair point" about land ownership when he embarked on his policy of expropriating farms from white people at the turn of the century, but added that the reactions "had posed a problem". Mugabe has trumpeted the so-called land-reform programme as a move to address colonial-era imbalances, but critics say that much of the land only ended up the hands of his cronies and blame the policy for the collapse of the agriculture sector in Africa's one-time breadbasket.